A (Very) brief introduction to BioRAT
BioRAT is a virtual research assistant, which will find research papers for you, read them, and tell you the key facts it finds. Well, that's the theory. It is part of an ongoing research project, and so is NOT a highly-polished, well-supported, fully-documented system that we might dream of. With suitable cajoling, it WILL let you find and download biological research papers, principally through PubMed. It WILL let you specify patterns of interesting words / phrases, and use these to "read" papers. It WILL put the results into a variety of useful formats, including XML and HTML. And it will continue to change, and I hope, improve with time.
At the heart of BioRAT is the GATE system from Sheffield University's Natural Language Processing group. This is a great open-source Java tool for performing various text processing tasks.
David Corney
University College London
March 2004